Testing macroecological theory using simplified systems

ended

Community assembly, how they change in space and time, and how they will be affected by global threats, is one of the most pressing issues in ecology and conservation biology. To fully understand assembly rules and community change, one has to delve into multiple interrelated factors, such as the history of environmental and habitat changes in the past, current biotic and abiotic factors, spatial constraints and future scenarios for all these. Yet, two factors have prevented us from obtaining a complete picture for any organism. First, communities are extremely complex, typically encompassing thousands of species and millions of interspecific interactions. Second, future scenarios are overwhelming to model without the challenge of dealing with chaotic systems, where even small changes can lead to large, unpredictable, consequences. Here, I propose to use cave communities as the simplest and easiest setting to model assembly rules and future change across space and time. Caves offer unique opportunities for eco-evolutionary studies because they are characterized by a low abundance and diversity of organisms and interactions, they receive limited external inputs and are easily modelled. By combining a range of state-of-art algorithms and computer simulations, I will investigate the eco-evolutionary processes that shape functional and taxonomic diversity in subterranean spider communities at a continental scale, as well as the sensitivity of specialised species to climate alterations. I will rely on extensive datasets already collected and try to answer the question: what drives community assembly across space and time, and how can we predict the consequences of climate change on current biomes?. The project will be implemented at the Finnish Natural History Museum, and will be supervised by Dr Pedro Cardoso. An intersectoral secondment in mechanistic modelling at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, supervised by Prof Volker Grimm, is also anticipated.